Chickenhawk John Bolton Lusts For A New War: To ‘End’ North Korea, ‘Basically’

John Bolton, the Iraq-war hawk Trumpster who has been salivating for a war with Iran, has a new war he’s pushing for: one that would bring about a “merger of two Koreas, the end of North Korea, basically.”

In a visit to America’s News HQ, Bolton and host Eric Shawn chatted casually about a potential nuclear war like it would be – oh, I don’t know, a cakewalk.

Shawn wondered what actual steps the Trump administration should use and asked, “Could we take out one of their launch pads?” to stop their possible nuclear warheads similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis. That ignores, of course, that we came perilously close to a full blown nuclear war, but I guess that’s a risk Shawn is willing to take.

Bolton explained we didn’t have the intelligence to actually launch that type of action, but said, “I think we’ve got to look much more closely at the possibility of some kind of military action which for years had been ruled against by very strong popular opinion by South Korea...”

Bolton was also unhappy with China’s twenty five years of ineptitude regarding North Korea nuclear program and wants Trump to put more pressure on them to do something.

Bolton said, “What I think the long term solution has to be is the merger of two Koreas, the end of North Korea, basically.”

There may not be any war that Bolton doesn’t love – except the one he could have fought in. As the Los Angeles Times noted, Bolton supported the Vietnam war but when he had a chance to fight it, he dodged the opportunity and joined the National Guard.

“I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” Bolton wrote of his decision in his Yale 25th reunion book. “I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”

Bolton is not just your garden-variety Fox News warmonger but a guy who, Fox News reported two months ago, had been under consideration to be Donald Trump’s secretary of state and was then being considered as a deputy secretary of state. Given that we know Trump gets policyideas from “the shows,” who knows what kind of message Bolton and Shawn were trying to send? Or worse, how it might have been received?

Watch the Republican death panel below, from the February 12, 2017 America’s News HQ, via Crooks and Liars.

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And, to add to David’s comment, the North Korean missiles are fully capable of reaching the Japanese home islands (one of the reasons that Japan’s PM was so concerned about NK’s recent missile test). If the US couldn’t take out ALL the missile launch facilities simultaneously, Pyongyang’s response would be a launch not just at South Korea but also Japan.

And, any attack on NK would NOT be welcomed by either South Korea or Japan. Hell, South Koreans don’t necessarily want to reunite with North Korea since it would be a veritable repeat of what happened with the Germanys in the early 90s. Both sides were ecstatic at the prospect of reunification but it soon became apparent to the former West Germans that they would bear the weight of helping the former East move towards the former West’s economic level; more recently, it’s been the former East that’s seen a major resurgence in neo-Nazi activity, including anti-immigrant actions, since the former East’s economy still lags woefully behind the former West’s—and that’s been a quarter century since reunification. The Vietnams were a bit of a reverse situation since the former North had lagged economically; even with the effects of the War, the former South had a much better economy. With the North’s conquest of the South and the resulting diaspora of much of the former South’s richer families, the economies of both halves became somewhat more equal.

Japan probably wouldn’t mind an economically weakened single Korea but, given the historical antipathy between Japan and Korea (both Koreas, actually), Japan would be on a constant alert that the single Korea might welcome economic aid from China and/or Russia (countries which also share some antagonism towards Japan); DOYC only knows that Chump’s USA won’t be helping to “clean up the mess” it makes after destroying the North (remember the mess the US made in Iraq?) UNLESS Korea allowed itself to become an American puppet state.

Starting a war with North Korea would be sadistic. Especially if the war were started over North Korea as a nuclear threat. North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are a chicken coop, a generator running off of methane from said chicken coop and plans written on the back of an envelope. We have given into NK’s food ransoms as a matter of the humane thing to do since Bill Clinton’s presidency. W thought he knew better and reversed that for a little while.

North Korea has a nuclear program like Trump has a new ACA. But North Korea does have a hell of a lot of very scary conventional weapons aimed at all the densely populated areas just across the border at South Korea. And they are set on a hair trigger.